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Now welcome to the award winning BestOfAleft podcast with Coupe today from the David Packen show, a TED Talk from Nigel Cameron, redacted tonight with Lee Camp, a progressive faith sermon with Dr. Roger Ray, and a TED Talk from Barry Schwartz.

Alright, let's talk a little bit about technology. We've been talking many conversations about technology and jobs. We've talked about autonomous vehicles and the impact that they likely will have on transportation jobs going forward.

There's a really interesting article from Wendell Wallach, who's an ethicist and also a scholar at Yale University, who said we have reached a tipping point for technology where technology is now destroying more jobs than it creates.

There's a point where on the net, new technology was still creating jobs by creating more industry and creating new opportunities and so on and so forth.

And Wendell Wallach says now the combination of robots and 3D printing and autonomous technologies and so much else is now going to fuel technological unemployment.

This is an unparalleled situation and one that I think could actually lead to all sorts of disruptions once the public starts to catch on that were truly in the midst of technological unemployment.

Some 47% of current jobs could be computerized in the next 10 to 20 years according to an Oxford University study. I'm reminded of that quote and I don't know offhand who it originally came from.

In capitalism, every human is either a capitalist, somebody else's capital or economically worthless.

We can't have a system where we laud the free market capitalism that so many love and at the same time want to take a completely anti free market approach to preventing technology from advancing merely to keep jobs.

What we're really talking about here is a transition to something called a post scarcity economy. This will take time. It should completely resolve abject poverty and hunger, but it likely won't Lewis.

It will likely lead if we don't change our to now and start thinking about this to an even greater wealth gap.

Yeah, in a perfect world, what you're suggesting is that the technology would do the work for us the technology would provide what we need and people wouldn't need you know we wouldn't need wage slaves anymore right the idea would be that this could disconnect us from that tired old cycle of work for money money to live live to work work for money money to live live to work we should be able to disconnect from that as this continues to happen unfortunately I'm

going to feel like our sort of weird stratification between capricious protectionism of certain industries combined with a broad amorphous free market ideology is not going to lead to that and this is a much bigger topic and I'm really interested in actually talking to some ethicists and futurists about this and we will definitely do that on the show.

Work to live live to work work to live live to live work to live live to work you gotta work work work to live your own telling you work work to live your own pushing you work work work to live your own swinging you gotta

I'd like to ask us a fundamental question this afternoon perhaps the most fundamental question which the human race confronts in the 21st century the most fundamental question is the

most fundamental question will this be the century which is best known which is marked which is overshadowed by the triumph of technology or will it be the century which is marked by the triumph of humanity will we be able to frame these extraordinary developments in technology in such a way that they enhance engage the

flourishing of the human race that seems to me the question of the 21st century in fact one could argue that it is the question of human history because for our throughout our history we have been striving,

to employ all the working labouring to create tools, homo sapiens wise man the name of our species is also homo favour the man who makes things humanity who creates tools to enable us to do our work

and we can see the history of the human race as a history in which we are able to accomplish more and more and more through the leveraging of our human efforts by hand by brain using tools

and this 21st century in the extraordinary experience of which we find ourselves our generation is the century in which there is no question that these tools will become very rapidly faster and faster more pervasive, more enabling, more powerful, more open to abuse, more open to enabling the flourishing of our human species

so that seems to me to be the question we face this year and in each year of the 21st century. Now the most evident way in which these technologies are beginning to affect us is a way which is very troubling which could also be very hopeful

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